Prue vs. The Hostesses

With a lot of encouragement I managed to drag Prue into the bar across the street from our hotel, the same bar I had entered the night before. Instantly we were set upon by a pack of young Khmer girls who greeted us and ushered us to a table where they sat with us staring at us with polite smiles. Prue shifted uneasily in her seat as we ordered a beer for myself and a margarita for Prue. The girls tried making conversation with us and Prue tried to find out the score asking them if they were paid to talk to us, but we struggled to translate the questions, so after much deliberation between the Hostesses they replied with “Do you want a Tuk-Tuk?”. Prue’s margarita was neon blue in colour and like myself the night before she swiftly sipped her drink and we bailed from the bar to find a less awkward place to enjoy a drink and get some dinner.

After two nights in Phnom Pehn we’d seen enough, it’s not that the place wasn’t interesting, just that it wasn’t very nice. We boarded a coach the next morning and headed south towards Shianoukville. We paid and extra $2 ($7 total) for the Airconditioned bus with a toilet and free drinking water, we didn’t see any drinking water but we were treated to some first class Cambodian Karaoke on the TV screen, the first half hour of the trip we pissed ourselves at the cheesiness of the Khmer music videos and especially the song called “New Zealand” we had no idea what the song was about but it was fun singing the only English words of the song “New Zealand” as they popped up on the screen.

After Karaoke we were treated to a Cambodian comedy show, we had no idea what was going on but the laughter from the Khmer people on our bus and the indecipherable madness happening on the screen made it quite entertaining. The laughter was stopped as we drove past a collision on the way out town, where a scooter rider had a very bloody forehead, a wound that probably would have been avoided had he been wearing a a helmet. We stopped at a rest point about halfway through the trip and found disappointment that there were no kids with Tarantulas hounding us to buy fruit, but we did find some of the yummy fried bananas we had in Battambang.

The second half of our trip on the bus became somewhat of a surreal experience… As soon as the bus had fired up the engine and roared off down the highway (road from Phnom Phen to Shianoukville is a very good road surprisingly) on came the TV and we found our self watching a 90’s Jackie Chan film dubbed into Khmer with English subtitles. The opening scene displayed the word “Melbourne” and we both had an “oh shit, no way” moment as we realised the film we were watching was not only filmed entirely in Melbourne. But when they filmed the movie Jackie Chan had stayed at Darling Towers our former work/home. We ended up watching the whole movie, shouting out locations as we recognised them and had a truly strange experience thinking about the coincidence of it all while we rolled into the beachside town of Shianoukville…